Many Catalogs At Your Fingertips--without A Postmark

November 13, 2000|By Michelle Slatalla, New York Times News Service.

In the past week, I have received 33 catalogs in the mail, a stack that weighed more than the cat. Even taking into consideration the fact that my bathroom scale routinely overestimates its load by one pants size, 13 pounds of glossy photos translates into a lot of leather luggage stands, dog breath spray and elk antler twig baskets that I will never buy.

With more than 10,000 paper catalog titles in print this year, maybe I should be grateful that more haven't found their way into my sagging mailbox. But after I lugged the whole pile out to the recycling bin, I started to long for a world in which mail-order catalogs didn't attack my home with the mass ferocity of killer bees.

I think that's why I was particularly susceptible, at first, to the charms of a new Internet site called MyOnlyCatalog.com. The site, which began operating earlier this month with an inventory selection that includes thousands of products from 114 mail-order catalogs, offers a single place for online shoppers to buy from all of them.

This sounded promising, especially since the home page at MyOnlyCatalog.com showed a photo of a cheery young woman saying into the phone, "Golly, does this mean we can toss all the catalogs out of the bathroom now?" Please let it be true, I thought.

Like the more established CatalogCity.com, which sells 200,000 items from 500 catalogs, MyOnlyCatalog.com enables shoppers to track the status of their orders by checking a single account. However, you still have to pay separate shipping costs to each catalog from which you order (shipping costs are calculated for each catalog and added to your total during checkout).

Both MyOnlyCatalog.com and CatalogCity.com scrutinize the customer service policies of catalogs to ensure they are friendly to shoppers before including their merchandise on the site. Shopper-friendly policies include things like accepting returns, offering refunds or having a customer service representative.

At MyOnlyCatalog.com, I clicked on "logOn" to create a new customer account, which required nothing more than entering an e-mail address (the site asks you for name, address and billing information during checkout). Then I clicked on "shopCatalogs" to start browsing.

That is where I saw the main problem with this system: None of the catalogs on the site were the same as those that arrived in my mail.

Instead, the list included merchandise mainly from companies I had never heard of, like Kryptolight International, which specializes in illuminated crystal charms, and Bri-Son Wallets, which sells a buffalo-hide model with a patented replaceable credit card holder for $55.50.

Most of the site's merchandise is from catalogs put out by fairly small companies, many of which had no previous Internet presence.

So unless the paper catalogs littering your bathroom floor have titles like Puddy Cat Stuff or Grampa Miller's Popcorn Connection, MyOnlyCatalog.com won't help you get rid of the clutter.

When I phoned the company's chief executive, Philip Berlin, to ask about the absence of the peskiest catalogs in my mailbox, he said, "Over time, you're going to see more and more catalogs on our site, but obviously not every one on your bathroom floor will be there."

On the other hand, Berlin seemed disturbingly unfamiliar with some of the companies that send me the most clutter. "Pottery Barn? I've never heard of them," he said.